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school. A who’s who of Silicon Valley players sent their children there. Steve’s involvement as a concerned parent put him in close contact with many of the people he had worked and fought with over the course of his career. Bud Tribble and Susan Barnes sent their kids to Nueva, and they would run into Steve at the school’s science fairs. Andy Cunningham’s daughter was in Reed’s class, and Andy herself was on the school board. Bill Atkinson, one of the software wizards behind the Macintosh, was a Nueva parent as well. So was Jef Raskin, the visionary who started the Macintosh project and ran it for several years before Steve took it over and their egos inevitably clashed. Raskin’s kids stood out because their names were palindromes, spelled the same backwards as forwards: Asa, Aviva.

Nueva appealed to wealthy, brilliant parents who wanted their children to have richly intellectual lives. The school was housed in a 1930s Italian Renaissance style mansion that had been built by the heir of a railroad tycoon. It was set atop Skyline Boulevard with panoramic views of San Francisco Bay and Silicon Valley. The enrollment was small, only three hundred students in grades one through eight, and the teachers and curriculum were exceptional. Steve Smuin, who ran the seventh and eighth grades, was considered by many students to be the best teacher they had ever encountered. He even taught Japanese to his thirteen-year-old pupils and took them on a field trip to Japan. But in 1997, he became the center of a controversy that bitterly divided the school’s community and served as a test of the values and personalities of the Nueva parents, including especially Steve Jobs.

Soon after graduating from eighth grade, the last grade in the school, a former student sent an anonymous e-mail to all of the Nueva parents and teachers. The student accused Steve Smuin of pushing and shoving him and verbally abusing him.

The charges outraged many of the parents, but Steve Jobs defended the teacher, whom he had long admired. Their affinity wasn’t surprising. Steve Smuin was like the Steve Jobs of teachers. Both men were undeniably brilliant but had a temperamental edge.

The school board moved to oust Smuin. Steve Jobs argued forcefully with the board members. He found himself joined in the cause by his old bitter rival, Jef Raskin. The two men enjoyed being on the same side, and they renewed their lost friendship.

When Smuin was ultimately ousted by Nueva, he founded his own middle school, Odyssey, in a nearby town. Steve Jobs provided funding for the new academy, and he removed Reed from Nueva and enrolled the second grader in public school in Palo Alto.

• • •

LAURENE JOBS began spending less time on her natural-foods business, and before long she and her partner would shut it down. She often worked out at the gym or took dance classes in the middle of the day, and she remained remarkably fit and attractive. She would prepare dinner for Steve, whose favorite dish was a salad of shredded raw carrots without dressing. Rupert Murdoch visited them in Palo Alto, and he later joked to one of his lieutenants: “Having dinner at Steve Jobs’s house is fine as long as you leave early enough so there are still restaurants open.” President Clinton came over for dinner, too. Steve and Laurene slept in the Lincoln Bedroom and attended a state dinner for China’s president Jiang Zemin at the White House, where they saw Clinton supporters such as Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, and Harvey Weinstein.

Steve enjoyed hobnobbing with celebrities and attending glamorous events and appearing once again on magazine covers, but he kept a sense of simplicity and tasteful restraint in his private life. He retained the spacious Woodside property as a place to hold Reed’s birthday parties, but his family continued living in the relatively modest house in Palo Alto. Their neighborhood became fashionable and extraordinarily expensive as it was discovered by young multimillionaires from the Internet boom. And Steve Young, the famous quarterback from the San Francisco 49ers, lived